Esarhaddon's Egyptian Defeat

[peterfc]

The Assyrian king, Esarhaddon, left a fairly comprehensive report about his 7th year conquest of Lower Egypt, telling of his mortally wounding the Egyptian king in battle and capturing his queen and his heir when he took Memphis. He also tells of marching his army up the Nile for 30 days in his 10th year; this being the opening move of a planned conquest of Upper Egypt. He does not record any more about this 10th year campaign. However, as he died in Harran in Syria in his 12th year on his way to renew his assault on Egypt, it is clear that this 10th year campaign up the Nile must have been unsuccessful. There is, of course, no Assyrian record of what went wrong, but surely there would have been an Egyptian report if Esarhaddon had been defeated.

There is, indeed, an Egyptian record of Esarhaddon’s defeat, but it is not recognised. This is because, in the Egyptian report, the invader came from the west. The Egyptian account of Esarhaddon’s defeat in Egypt is told in the Victory Stele of the Nubian General, Piye (Piankhy), a translation of which can be found in Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, vol 4, 796 to 883 (see Hans Goedicke, Pi(ankh)y in Egypt, Halco 1998, for a more recent and better translation). The invader from the west was called Tefnakhte (Mighty Tef) on this stele.

The Victory Stele says that, after Piye learnt how Tefnakhte had defeated the dynasts of the western delta and seized both shores of the Nile above the delta, he received appeals for help saying “wilt thou be silent even to forgetting the Southland while Tefnakhte advances his conquest?” Piye ordered his commanders not to waste time awaiting his arrival, but to oppose Tefnakhte without him. Sailing downstream from Thebes, Piye’s commanders first defeated Tefnakhte’s fleet and then his retreating army. After this battle, Nimlot, one of the Egyptian kings supporting the invader, fled southwards to his city of Hermopolis, which he reached just ahead of Piye’s army. When he arrived at Hermopolis, Piye negotiated the surrender of the city and its Asiatic defenders. He and his army then continued downstream, reaching Memphis late in April. Tefnakhte ordered his Memphis garrison to stand firm while he went for reinforcements, but Piye, noting that the river water came up to the road below the walls, assaulted and captured the city without a siege by mooring his ships along the harbour wall. The Victory Stele records that Ionian troops and a foreign king were captured when Memphis was taken. Tefnakhte withdrew to the west and took refuge on an island in the delta where the Nile flood protected him. Note, this Nile flood was in the Spring, not the Autumn, as it has been for almost all of the past 2,650 years.

The Asiatics, the Ionians and the foreign king could only have been in Egypt if they were serving in an Assyrian army; the Biblical record allows no other possibility. This Assyrian army advanced from the western delta, the Southland needed help from a Nubian general, Nimlot retired to the south after the defeat of the invading army and the Nile was in flood in April, because the World was inverted at the time. The Victory Stele makes it clear that while Piye was the ruler of Egypt when he had his stele erected in year 21, he was not during his campaign against Tefnakhte. In my catastrophe based chronology, Piye’s successful campaign took place 13 years after the inversion catastrophe that I date to 674 BC and the Victory Stele was erected by Piye in the 21st year of the new World Age when he was ruling Egypt as his nephew’s regent.

The Egyptians, like the Assyrians, never mentioned defeats in their inscriptions and historians rely on Assyrian texts and the Babylonian Chronicles when writing about this period of Egyptian history. It is not surprising that historians, from the third century BC to the present day, with no awareness that world inversions were possible, have not been able to make sense of the data available to them. The attempts of 3rd century BC Jewish scholars to devise / agree a chronology from Biblical data for Ptolemy has not helped; they, like modern historians, could not imagine the world experiencing inversions and increases in orbit. However, it is scientifically possible that the electromagnetic forces of Wal Thornhill’s “Electrically Modified Newtonian Mechanics” theory, generated between Venus and Earth when they came close to one another, could have driven both Peter Warlow style “inversions” and increases in Earth’s orbit.